Category Archives: Winter

The robins are back. The redwing blackbirds returned today. But there is still snow on the ground, and I am still wearing my down coat, and down gloves, and a wool hat.The temps are not going above 40 degrees for the foreseeable future. The lake is still frozen.

Everyone is talking about it. Everyone is complaining and calling it the “unendurable winter.” Since we don’t live in Florida, we are allowed to say “climate change” and a lot of people are saying it.

So I decided to try to come up with 10 Reasons to be happy that it still winter. I enlisted G in this game, and here is our list.

1. We are saving a lot of money on sunscreen.

2. We can stay in the hot tub all night and not get “too hot.”

3. We have no guilt in indulging in Netflix marathons of “House of Cards.”

4. There is no hurry to go into storage and drag out the capris and the t-shirts and put away the sweaters.

5. Neither of us have finished our winter books, so we can sit by the fire and read without the pressure of feeling we should be doing something outside.

6. We both hate taking the cover off the AC unit and there is no reason to do that.

G headed to Wilmington, North Carolina this morning with her team to try to play softball.

Today is also her birthday. (She is 47 today. Happy Birthday, honey!)

She almost always spends her birthday on the road with her team. She’ll be home by St. Patrick’s Day though, and then we’ll celebrate her birthday in fine fashion.

In the meantime, Boomer and I are home alone, holding down the fort.

Boomer is moping on the couch beside me at the moment. She knows that something is off, and she blames me. She saw the luggage on the bed all week, and now it is gone, and so is G, and the TV is not on like it is supposed to be, and I am reading a book instead of watching Property Brothers, and everything is fucked.

We go through this every year. She’ll be pissed at me for not being G until tomorrow night. Tonight she will barf a large pile of something yellow and lumpy on the dining room floor, I will clean it up in the morning, then we’ll be even. She will have punished me for not being G, and we can then return to being amigos again.

She will resign herself to my ways, which are not so much different from G’s, but different enough that she gets peeved. She will particularly hate me in the mornings because I am not terribly responsive at 6:30 AM when she expects to be fed, but to appease her, I will drag my sorry ass out of bed, down the stairs to the Kibble Keeper, drop a scoop in her bowl, and then return to my cozy bed to contemplate the day ahead with my eyes closed for another hour.

G just called with an update. The bus picked up a nail in one of its tires and so the team is hanging out in some truck stop 2 hours from their final destination.

This has been a very long winter. But surprisingly, I am okay. I am not great, but I am fine. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being overjoyed and 1 being suicidal, I have maintained a solid 7 all winter.